Miss Ladyboy Contest

This is a beauty pageant and it's like any other miss contest where women compete with each other for the title of who’s the most beautiful in the world. Except it has one little but crucial difference: The contestants all used to be or still are men!!! Yep, this is going to blow your mind away and I'm not being dramatic. I’m talking about the Miss Ladyboy International 2010 in the city of Udon Thani in Thailand.

Some of those participants look so gorgeous that they’d easily shine in any other beauty paegant. It is truly unbelievable that they might be men or even that they were ever male. With some of them, nothing would persuade you that they're anything but stunningly beautiful women. Forget blurring the gender boundaries when you can just blow them up entirely!

So who are the participants?

Well, to me they’re just people – really beautiful ones at that and I would tend to call them women simply because they're just so convincing. But, what gender they are is something you have to ask each one of them directly. Some may see themselves as very feminine men. Others may see themselves as women who

started off as men. There are some commonly used words like shemale or ladyboy but these are considered insulting and not always applicable. The word transvestite is also not good enough because it is only used to refer to dressing like the opposite sex but these girls are far more than just dressed up. So for lack of a better term I’m going to call them fe-males. If you can come up with something better please let me know because I’m tapping around in the dark here. Actually we’re all kind of tapping around in the dark.

Thailand is known to have many such fe-males and some of the most beautiful. I doubt that Thailand has more transgender people than any other country but it seems that they are a lot more open about gender deviation in Thailand. And because of this, many
more act out their perceived gender openly. In fact, many people talk about a 3rd gender in this context. Thai people are clearly more accepting to people who don’t fit into gender norms or stereotypes. So let’s hear it for Thailand!

What is fascinating about all this, is that these pretty fe-males are often very popular with heterosexual

men! That doesn’t surprise me given how beautiful they look but it does make me wonder if the world of gender and attraction isn’t even more complicated than we all thought. So straight guys love guys who look like girls! I’ve talked before about how cross-dressers are sometimes attracted to each other when dressed up. Straight men being attracted to men who look like women must be closely connected to that. This area of gender and sexuality is absolutely fascinating to me. It is so unknown and hardly ever talked about and I feel a strange kind of envy when I think about two beautiful feminine men making out. I suppose they have everything and the best of both worlds. It’s a strange combination of attraction and jealousy that I feel towards them.

I applaud this beauty contest and hope that there will be more of them also in other nations. Clearly there are many fe-males in the world and it is time to give them their rightful place in society. Perhaps we need a 3rd gender after all in order to represent such people fairly. I’d love to hear from someone who considers themselves one of these fe-males. Please tell me about yourself, how you got to where you are and what you aspire to achieve in life.